


Bright Lights and Cityscapes

by bamboozledone



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Revolution AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-16
Updated: 2013-04-16
Packaged: 2017-12-08 15:55:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/763216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bamboozledone/pseuds/bamboozledone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles stands up, wiping the dust off his jeans. “Dude, you can’t go alone to Santa Fe. That’s suicide. Plus, you’re going to get really, really bored after like, twenty miles.” [NBC's 'Revolution' AU.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bright Lights and Cityscapes

Derek loses Laura like this:

 

He's in the grain fields right outside town, wandering. It's going to be a full moon that night, and while he might be a Born wolf, he still struggles with fighting the Shift every month. Laura is better at it: Her Anchor has always been Derek, and he's somehow ashamed that she isn't his Anchor too. Instead, he meanders for hours on end, listening to the dull sound of the winds sweeping across the meadows, and willing his blood pressure and heart rate to drop before the sun starts to set.

 

His body is calm, content after an hour or two, and that’s when the sound catches on the wind. _Gunshots_. Not a sound he hears with any frequency. Not for years at least, back when the Militia did walkthroughs of the townships on a monthly basis. A lot of people died back then. But with the bridge into the town washing out three years ago, the Militia doesn’t come to Beacon much anymore.  Too much effort for not enough profit. Beacon Hills is a sustenance community, no trade in or out. Not good for Militia exploitation, Derek’s father always says. Derek suspects that he likes it that way.

 

More gunshots echo through the silence. Derek runs back to the town limits on light feet, his heart racing as he sees a crowd gathered in the town square, huddled around a mass on the ground.

 

“Derek!’ It’s Stiles Stilinski’s voice. He has an almost demented look in his eye as he pulls Derek forward, to the center of the melee. “Derek, we couldn’t do anything…”

 

Derek pushes past Danny and Greenburg and a couple kids he doesn’t know. He smells the blood when he shoves Scott McCall and his mother out of the way, lurching forward as the scent hits his nose with violent abandon. His father is on the ground. He’s not dead, not yet, but Derek doesn’t need to be a wolf to know that he’s close to it.

 

“Laura?” he asks hoarsely. His father twists, helpless, in front of him. ‘Where’s Laura?” 

 

"They took her," Deaton says from outside the circle. His face is hard, harder than it normally is, and there’s a faint trickle of blood running down his forearm from a bullet wound in his shoulder. "Kate Argent and her men took her. She's gone, Derek."

 

“Gone?” He’s suddenly a child again, his mother smiling sadly at him as she says goodbye. He kneels down on the ground until his head stops spinning. “Gone?”

 

"Find Peter. Your _uncle_ ," his father begs from the ground. Derek can feel the blood from his father's wounds pulsing into his open hand. "He’s in Santa Fe. He can help you find Laura. He's your only shot at getting her back."

 

He doesn’t hear much after that. He knows that people are murmuring sympathies, and he catches Stiles’ eyes, dark and sorrowful as he heads back to his house.

 

Only later does Derek think that his father said _can_ and not _will_.

 

\---

 

There’s no time for a proper burial, not when Chris Argent and the Militia have his sister and Derek has more than a thousand miles to walk to search out an uncle he never even knew existed. Derek makes sure to force a promise out of the local undertaker to burn his father’s body once he left. “He never wanted to be trapped underground,” Derek says with a cold eye to the ground. “Please, do this for him.”

 

Derek packs a small black backpack with dried fruits, a lighter, and three sets of clothes. He thinks about bringing the little blue tent his father kept in the kitchen, under the sink that they never saw function, but he knows that he needs to remain as inconspicuous as possible. Remaining under the radar is the safest way to travel in this day and age.

 

“They wanted your father,” Deaton tells him later, when Derek comes to him for a first aid kid and miscellaneous lightweight provisions. “Commander Argent came into town and asked for him by name.” He pauses, looks around the empty doctor’s office. “They think he knew something. Something about why the lights went out.”

 

“How do you know that?”

 

Deaton’s eyes flicker to Derek’s face. “There’s a lot you don’t know about your parents, Derek. Just know that they were good people while they were here, but that was not always the case before the Blackout.”

 

Derek can tell there’s a story there, one that he might want or not want to hear. But instead he nods his head, and accepts the dirty plastic box filled with bandages and a small vial of penicillin.

 

“Be safe, Derek.”

 

Derek doesn’t look back, heads out the front door with his backpack slung low over his shoulder.

 

\---

 

He doesn’t notice them for at least ten miles. His mind is elsewhere, racing with the implications of what Deaton told him. He doesn’t know what it means, doesn’t have a clue why the Militia would want anything to do with his family. It doesn’t make any sense to single out a father whose sole work since the Blackout had been tending a small crop and caring for his two children.

 

“Fuck,” he hears someone swear behind him. There’s a couple snapping branches, and then the loud impact of a body on the ground. He turns toward the direction of the town, and sees three figures on the horizon, one sprawled across the dirt and the other two hovering over him like birds above the ocean. They’re all weighed down by their own backpacks, two black and one a dusty pink.

 

“Damn it Scott, I swear to God…” Derek knows Stiles’ voice from here. It’s distinct, more melodic than most of the voices he hears in town. He sees Stiles kneel next to Scott. The flash of red nails tells him that Lydia Martin is the other figure. Stiles waves at him, unnecessarily enthusiastic. Derek shouldn’t be surprised. Stiles Stilinski never did know when to leave well enough alone.

  
“Jesus, Stiles, what the hell?”

 

Stiles stands up, wiping the dust off his jeans. “Dude, you can’t go alone to Santa Fe. That’s suicide. Plus, you’re going to get really, really bored after like, twenty miles.”

 

Derek snorts. “And you three are going to be my what? Sad sidekicks?” He turns forward again, tugging his backpack up. “Go home, Stiles.”

 

“Look, we’re coming with you, whether you want company or not.” Lydia sharpens a silvery blade on a nearby tree, a hallow threat at best. “We really don’t have anything better to do.” 

“You do know that you can’t actually hurt me.”

 

Lydia cocks her head. “No, probably not.” The knife glistens in her hand, and Derek is reminded that Lydia is not the little princess that most of the town seems to think she inhabits. “But I think we all know that you really can’t do this by yourself.”

 

“Just let us come,” Scott says as he hauls himself up. His skin is pink in the low light of the evening.

 

“Yeah,” Stiles echoes. There’s a sincerity there that cuts into Derek, just a little bit. It reminds him of Laura, and he feels it rush through him, the pain, again. “Please, Derek. We want her back too.”

 

Derek has a hundred and one reasons why he should say no. They’re nowhere near the end of what this conversation should conclude. But as he looks at the three teenagers, all misfits and outcasts in their own right, he thinks of Laura. “Be kind,” she would say as they’d sit in the bright sunshine of the fields. She would hold his hand and they would run, run, until neither one could breathe and they’d collapse in a pile on the ground, laughing. “Trust people, Derek. They’ll surprise you in the end.”

 

He has to get her back, and if these kids ( _not kids_ , he thinks to himself, but they really _are_ , aren’t they?) are willing to help, he can’t say no.

 

“You better keep up,” Derek says roughly, and turns on his heel in the damp dirt, due south.

 

\---

 

Derek was sixteen, and growing into a life that he doesn’t understand yet. The world before the Blackout was a foreign concept to him. He remembered little things about power and energy from here and there, half-memories of watching a show about rabbits or listening to a song about love on the radio his mom left in the kitchen when she was baking cookies. But those memories faded more and more each passing day, until he couldn’t remember what a television screen even looked like, or how a singer sounded through metal speakers in the living room.

 

“Whatcha doing?” a voice said from behind him. Derek was sitting on his porch, willing the hours to go faster than they usually during the summer months. Stiles Stilinski appeared in his sightline, skipping up with a baseball glove and ball. He was all of ten years old, didn’t look a moment over, and had a grin that spread from cheek to cheek. Derek saw him tripping around town once and awhile, his father chasing after him with a laugh and a helping hand when Stiles fell down.

 

“Sitting,” Derek replied with an already well-honed stoicism. “Does it look like I’m doing something else?”

 

Stiles smiled wider. “Want to play baseball? You look bored.”

 

As a point of fact, Derek _was_ bored, but he didn’t want to play with a kid who had the motor skills of an infant. “Go home to your mom. I don’t want to play with you.”

 

“Don’t have a mom,” Stiles said, unfazed. He threw the ball up into the air, and caught it clumsily in his gloved hand. “She died when the lights went out.”

 

It’s a very blunt confession, and stunned Derek into silence.

 

“Mine too.” Derek’s response was true, sort of. Maybe his mother didn’t actually die when the Blackout happened, perhaps it was three months later when she leaned down and gave Laura and Derek kisses on the forehead and told them that she would be back by morning but never was.

 

"Half-orphans," Stiles had said, now frowning as he took a seat next to Derek on the porch. Derek could see the small marks on his cheeks that would never quite become freckles. "That's what we are, you and me." He tossed the baseball to Derek, who caught it reflexively, and then tossed to ball back.

 

It was strange to Derek at the time, that someone so young could understand just how alone he was in the world. But as the year passed by, Derek came to see that Stiles was nothing if not in total comprehension of the world around him. Perception, even the most unwanted of perception, was Stiles’ gift.

 

\---

 

They are sitting by the fire Stiles made with a little flint and some dry brush he found by the side of the gravel road. It’s a steady burn, the flames licking at the night air as the wind whips around the group of four. An involuntary shiver goes through Derek, and he thinks about how he neglected to bring a jacket with him in his haste to get out of town. He’s regretting it now, is sure he’ll regret it more later.

 

“Here,” Stiles says with no ceremony, handing him something with a wary look in his eye. “You should probably have this now, not me.”

 

Derek’s fist closes reflexively around the object. When he opens his hand, slowly, he looks down. In the center of his palm is a pendant, no bigger than a daisy, made of a bright metal that reflects in the early morning sunlight. Derek feels it thrum in his hand, steady like the beating of rain against the rooftop of his house.

 

"You dad gave it to me when I was a kid. Told me to always keep it safe." Stiles laughs, a hint of bitterness marking his face. "I thought he gave it to me to shut me up. You know, give the ADD kid a shiny thing to keep him from talking.” Stiles chuckles. “He wouldn't have been wrong. I used to stare at it for like, hours when I was alone. I thought it was fucking magical or something."

 

“What is it?”

 

Stiles shrugs. The oversized sweatshirt he wears opens at the neck, showing off the pallid skin underneath when he crushes a small, smoldering cinder on the ground with his boot “Beats me. Kind of pretty, though, right?”

 

Derek doesn’t know much about beauty, but as the tender pulsing continues in his hand, he thinks the pendant might just be.

 

\---

 

A thousand miles is no short distance to traverse. Each day passes more slowly than the last one. In the beginning, Lydia, Scott, and Stiles keep to themselves. It makes sense: They’re all relatively close in age, and grew up in Beacon Hills since their infancy. They are the only three teenagers in town by now. It’s natural that they should band together in an unfamiliar situation.

 

Derek knows that they make a dysfunctional family at best. Lydia is terrifying on her most productive days, Scott is incompetent pretty much all the time, and Stiles can’t shut up, no matter how many times and how effusively Derek tells him to. When it comes down to it, Derek is probably the biggest head case of all of them, and the least willing to admit it. None of them are even trained in the sort of hand to hand combat that it will take to get Laura back. And, even though they have a plan to find Peter, no plan exists beyond that.

 

But they are a team. A Pack, Derek thinks one hazy afternoon when he sees Lydia curl into Stiles and Scott as they sleep in a shallow bed of leaves.  It’s curious how none of them are wolves, yet they mimic their dynamics like it’s second nature.

 

“Get over here, asshole,” Stiles calls after Derek’s been staring at him for a few minutes. Lydia snuggles tighter into his chest when Derek pulls up behind Scott, rests his head on Stiles’ shoulder.

 

During the course of the afternoon, he shuffles away, lies on his own against a tree, but he thinks he should be rewarded just for trying.

 

\---

 

When they cross into the Arizona territory, Derek starts hearing a low buzzing in his head, like the beginning of a headache he can’t quite prevent. It gets progressively louder as they head closer to the derelict border town, reaching a crescendo when they enter a large shopping complex.

 

“What’s that?” Stiles asks carefully, his voice echoing across the deserted stores. “It sounds like…”

 

“Music,” Derek interrupts him. “It’s music.”

 

Derek jogs down the tiled hallway until he hears the music get louder, can feel the bass pulsing through his bones. Stiles starts running to catch up with him, Scott and Lydia close behind. It’s a recording that Derek feels like he should know. They enter the electronics store, which is barely touched, and Derek sees _it_ before anything else.

 

There’s another silver pendant, glowing, and lying neglected next to a black CD player.

 

Stiles, Lydia, and Scott all skid in next to him, and Stiles whoops loudly when he sees the blue flashing lights on the CD player. “See Lydia! I told you from the start that we’d have power back again someday.”

 

“Stiles, just because one little machine goes on, it doesn’t mean that…”

 

Derek isn’t really listening to their conversation. He can barely see past the pendant, just lying there, identical to the one in his pocket. “Do you remember this?” Derek smiles, despite himself. He picks up the pendant with undue reverence as Stiles spins around the room in a fit of glee, Lydia and Scott laughing in the background. “Music?”

 

It’s a poorly worded question, really. In their town, there are five or six guitars floating around between different family units, and a consistent group of old timers who sit in front of the old Baptist church, plucking on banjos and mandolins during the springtime. In the Martin house, there’s even a baby grand that Mrs. Martin teaches the young school kids to play when she’s not tending to the herbs in her garden.

 

“Not like this.” Stiles closes his eyes, eyelashes fluttering. “I was only a year old when the Blackout happened.”

 

One year old. Stiles wouldn’t even remember what it was like to sit in front of a television, watch idly as the lights on the screen flickers against the walls. He wouldn't remember music on the radio during a lazy Saturday afternoon, or rolling down the windows in an air condition car on a road trip, watching as red rocked hills and green grass whips by.

 

For the next hour, Lydia and Stiles sway in the center of the room to the music (Dean Martin, Derek finally figures out about halfway through the second sound), his hands on her waist until, finally, the lights turn off and the CD player powers down. She rests her head on his shoulder afterward, and his chin lies atop her red hair, sharp against soft.

 

\---

 

Allison Anderson (at least that's what she says her name is, but Derek knows better than to trust a pretty girl with a pretty mouth and pretty bow and arrow) joins their group before they reach Santa Fe. It’s too quick, too easy. Scott finds her shooting a deer in a pristine meadow outside Phoenix, and brings her back to the group without a moment’s hesitation because he never learned to think with his brain instead of his dick.

 

“You know she’s probably Militia, right?” Derek grunts in a low whisper as Scott trots over with a stupid grin on his face. “They like doing this kind of thing. Get close to the vagrant Unaffiliated and taking them into Militia custody when they have the chance.”

 

“Your paranoia is going to get us into trouble one of these days.” Stiles continues chewing obnoxiously on the piece of mint leaf in his mouth. “Really Derek, lighten up.”

 

Derek lets Allison join them, with more than a little reluctance. But Scott becomes moderately less useless when Allison is around and Stiles and Lydia suddenly have more time for him, and he feel a little bit of weight off his shoulders whenever he sees Stiles shoot him a mischievous little grin when he doesn’t think Derek’s looking.

 

\---                              

 

“Can I just…”

 

"Don't touch," Derek growls, swatting Stiles’ hand away as he pulls on the metal grip of the trigger. "Go make dinner or something. Be useful."

 

Stiles makes another impotent grab for the black crossbow, and earns another half-hearted growl from Derek for his troubles. "Come on, man, I have to learn how to defend myself somehow."

 

“Stiles, man, he’s never going to give up the goods,” Scott barks from across the clearing. “Let it go.”

 

Derek nods his agreement with Scott’s statement. “You’re not here to be a fighter, Stiles. That’s not your job.”

 

“What exactly is my job then? To stand back and look pretty?”

 

“Exactly,” Derek answers, mock-serious. “And we protect our luxury assets with our lives.”

 

"Awww, Derek, did you just admit that you'll save me in my times of need and near-death experience?” Stiles tosses a stone at Derek, and missed completely. “And since when did I become the freaking damsel in distress in this posse?" He throws another stone toward Derek, missing his legs by a couple inches this time. "And if anybody is the damsel, shouldn't it by definition be Lydia?"

 

"Says the guy who can't even hold a knife without cutting himself," Lydia points out for the other side of the clearing. She raises Allison's spare bow to her brow line, and hits the makeshift target Stiles hung on an ash tree, dead center. A wicked smile paints her face, and she sticks her tongue out at Stiles.

 

“Show off,” Stiles grumbles, pulling out the grey flint from his pocket to start a fire.

 

\---

 

Santa Fe is deserted, like most of the major metropolitan areas in the Former United States. More danger in cities, his father had told Derek, like poisoned water supplies and airborne disease. Beacon Hills was at least a four days walk from a city. His father had liked it that way, being in a remote place, far from the reaches of anyone of consequence.

 

They find Peter Hale in what used to be a dive bar, a few women who look one less than a week past their eighteenth birthdays perched on his arms. He’s a smaller man, compact, much like Derek’s father had been, with dark eyes that seem to keep moving no matter how still her remains. He has a worn look about him, like he’s been left out in the sun too long and has dried up, threatening to crumble into dust.

 

“You look just like your mother,” he says when Derek walks over to him, Stiles, Scott, and Lydia in tow. “Spitting image, really.”

 

The fighting breaks out a few minutes later, when Peter hands Derek a sword from behind the bar and whispers _behind you_ before breaking a bottle on top of a man’s head. The Militia was following then. Derek has no doubt that the girl they call Allison was involved, but she’s not saying anything about it, and she’s definitely not fighting now to implicate herself in the treason.  

 

Peter Hale is brilliant with his sword and with his teeth. It's a thing of beauty, to watch him as he takes down the armed Militia men with a perfectly balanced saber. It's rusted at the hilt, Derek can see that from here, but it function as perfectly as if the blade were cut yesterday, from the toughest and lightest metal science could create. Derek isn’t shabby with the sword, but he knows it’s more luck than skill, like most things in his life.

 

"You really think this old drunk is going to save your sister?" Stiles asks later, after the Militia has gone off to lick their wounds, and when Peter takes another deep swig from the whiskey bottle. Stiles’ hand is steady on Derek’s crossbow, and Derek wonders how long it’s going to take to pry is out of his long fingers. "His blood content is probably half alcohol, Derek."

 

Derek knows what it means to be a functioning addict. He watched his father struggle to keep himself through home made batches of a white substance that Derek never had the stomach to research the few times Laura dragged him to the library to fetch new reading material. He never wanted to know, anyway.

 

“He’s our only shot,” Derek says. The words feel futile, cheap on his tongue,

 

\---

 

Peter agrees to go with them, to help get Laura back. He doesn’t look thrilled about it, but with the Militia fixed on his scent and Derek with a crossbow pointed to his temple, he really doesn’t have much of a choice. He says that the Militia has a base in what used to be Nashville. Chris Argent is quartered there, has been for seven years. That’s the only place they can be keeping Laura. So with a heavy sigh and heart, they turn east, toward the Plans territory, and start walking.

 

\---

 

They meet people along the way, most who are at least nominally friendly with the Militia, but every so often they meet somebody with an American flag tattooed in black ink on their arm or their back. Rebels. “Unaffiliated,” Derek will tell them when they give him suspicious looks. A couple Rebels appear to recognize Peter, but if there’s something there, Peter is remaining quiet on the subject.

 

They don’t encounter trouble, not really, until suddenly they do. A couple pickpockets who try to steal their meager supplies during the night, but Peter dispenses of them with the knife he keeps tucked in his brown leather boots. It bothers Derek the first time it happens, the scent of blood in the air thick around him, choking him. He has to remind himself that this is why they need Peter. Peter knows how to handle death and knows that lines have to be crossed here and there to bring Laura back, safe and sound.

 

“Don’t let it bother you,” Stiles says when Peter slits the neck of a burly man with a machete. He buries him in a shallow grave by the side of the road, marked by a large red rock with no name.

 

Derek snorts. “It doesn’t bother you?”

 

Stiles shakes his head. “No time to let it bother me. Not with Laura still out there.”

 

It’s a hard truth to swallow, but Derek does.

 

\---

 

It comes out. Of course it comes out. Skeletons always find a way of pushing into the light, no matter how deep somebody tries to bury them.

 

“The Militia!” Derek can feel his claws lengthening as Peter remains silent, standing resolute in the corner of the abandoned warehouse. Scott is in the other corner, tending to a head wound on Lydia and what looks like a broken arm on Allison. “You used to be Militia!”

 

“Correction: I used to _run_ the Militia.” There’s no remorse, not a trace of earned guilt. Peter’s eyes remain steady, a faint golden glow running around the irises as he stares back at Derek. “I was a very powerful man when I worked with Chris Argent, Derek, do show some respect.”

 

“You and Chris Argent?” Stiles gives Derek a dubious look. His gaze flickers back to Peter, who has started to smirk with the tandem conclusions Stiles has rightly or wrongly drawn. “You make interesting bedfellows.”

 

“Old military buddies from back in the day and all that it implies. He was understandably not thrilled with the whole werewolf thing, but when the world is going to shit, little things like fangs and claws become less and less important.”

 

“Oh my god, you are so not helping yourself,” Stiles mutters. He pushes Peter forward with his hands, stumbling when Peter doesn’t budge. “Derek, you really need to think about this for a second…”

 

“You have to go.” Derek pulls a corroded shotgun off the shelf, and looks for some loose shells in a cardboard box on the floor. He can hear Peter shuffling toward the door as he loads the shotgun with little finesse. Some of the shells fall on the floor around his feet and Derek grunts. Guns have never been his weapon of choice. “Stiles, he can’t stay with us.”

 

“Excuse me, were you not the Sourwolf one who said we need him over and over again?” Stiles picks up a couple shells from the ground, blows the dust off of them, and motions for Peter to come back from his retreat. “I mean, it’s been your mantra since we found him in that dump of a bar a month ago.”

 

“Yeah well, I was wrong,” Derek snaps. He cocks the gun in Peter’s direction. “You. Get out.”

 

Stiles, who has never been one to listen to Derek, stands in front of Peter, very literally looking down the barrel of Derek’s gun. “You and I both know that he’s the only way we’re going to get Laura back. Put down the gun and stop acting like a five year old in the middle of a tantrum.”

 

“We can’t trust him trusted. He was Militia.”

 

Stiles groans. “Shit, Derek, he’d take a Wolfsbane bullet for you. He wouldn’t have come this far if he hadn’t. Can’t you see that?”

 

Derek lowers the shotgun, just an inch. Peter, obviously never one to shy away from the drama, pushes Stiles to the side and walks right up to Derek, close enough until he can taste the breath from Peter’s mouth.

 

Derek pushes the gun to Peter’s stomach, then to his neck, and finally leaves it on his right temple. He can see the sweat pooling on Peter’s brow, glistening as it runs down his face. He takes immense satisfaction that he’s been able to undo Peter, even this little bit. “Can we trust you?”

 

“Yes,” Peter breathes. “Yes, you can trust me.”

 

It’s perhaps not the right question.  There are too many interpretations of what trust means for Derek to get a clear answer. Derek can hear Peter’s feel his heart rate increase, but there’s no lie here.

 

Derek drops the rest of the shells, and tucks the shotgun back on the shelf. His hands are shaking, and he feels like he did when he found his father in the center of town, the life slowly being leeched out of him.

 

“Jesus,” Stiles murmurs when Derek sags against him. “You look really stupid with a gun, Derek. Don’t do that ever again if you want people to take you seriously.”

 

It hurts to laugh, but he does it anyway.

 

\---

 

"When the power comes back on, I am going to be an invaluable asset to the nation's infrastructure," Stiles promises one afternoon as he flips through the yellowing pages of the _Windows 8 for Dummies_ book. "While everyone else who used to work in the tech industry is sitting around on their asses waiting for death and destruction, I will be completely ready to jump back into the workforce with my carefully honed knowledge of Internet Explorer.”

 

“Jump in for the first time,” Derek reminds him. Peter rolls his eyes, watching with a wary eye as Allison teaches Scott to use her serrated dagger. “Unless you were using a computer before you could walk?”

  
“Duh.” Stiles grins. The weather is good here, and they haven’t run into the Militia in weeks. Everyone is at ease in the way they haven’t been in a long time. “You just wait and see me succeed, Derek Hale. It’s going to be a thing of beauty.”

 

Derek sort of likes it. That it's a _when_ for Stiles, not an _if_ , not a hypothetical. He remembers Stiles being like this from the beginning. Stiles Stilinski came onto his radar with a smile and goal. He doesn’t see why it shouldn’t be that way now.

 

\---

 

After dinner of fish from a clean stream, Stiles and Lydia are washing up by the river, and Scott is curled into a ball at the foot of a tree, napping. He caught the edge of a sword in the side that afternoon, and while it’s not serious, Scott is not exactly the iron man of the group. They largely leave him alone when he’s hurt, and it works for everyone involved.

 

Derek is alone with his thoughts as he hears Peter stand up from his place around the fire. He sees him stalk toward Allison, who is sharpening the tips of some of her arrows when he pushes her against a tree, holds her arms against the trunk.

 

“Peter!”

 

If he hears Derek, then Peter ignores him. Peter grabs Allison’s wrist, shoves her shirt sleeve up until he reveals her bare arm. The brand is on her forearm, thick and solid. The large _M_ sticks out like a scab on her pale skin, and she finches when he fingers the burn, pushing down into the flesh until Allison winces.

 

“Let go of me,” she hisses. “Seriously, that hurts.”

 

“I know you’re Militia,” Peter says quietly. “Knew it from the moment you walked into the bar. You’re an Argent.” He puts his face in her neck, inhales deeply. “You can smell it on you. All the Argents smell the same. Like misery and death.”

 

She looks for a moment like she’s going to deny it, but she doesn’t. Instead, she pushes her head forward, stubborn, continuing to fight against Peter’s strong hold.

 

“You have one of two choices. One, you can get out of here. Don’t look back, and never, ever say anything to anybody. Or two…” Peter drops her arms. She doesn’t move. “You can stay here and leave the Militia behind. Come with us. Help us get Laura Hale back.”

 

“And what, exactly, is stopping me from running to the nearest Militia outpost?” she snarls when he steps forward again.

 

“You have to make choices every day that you don’t want to make,” Peter says. “Trust me, this isn’t the worst one you have in front of you.” He steps back, adjusting his collared shirt. “I’m giving you this chance, Allison, because someone gave me the same chance a long time ago. Take it. I insist.”

 

“Don’t think I don’t remember you,” she bites out when he turns away. “Don’t for a second think that you can disappear again.”

 

Peter gives her an unimpressed look. “You don’t have half the anger or resentment your father has, Allison. Don’t pretend you do. It’s incredibly unbecoming.”

 

In the morning, Allison is still there. She’s asleep against Scott’s chest, with Lydia’s head pillowed between her breasts. At breakfast, she flinches when Stiles accidentally brushes against the covered brand.

 

“You okay?” he asks, concerned.

 

“Fine,” she says, teeth clenching when Peter smiles and waves at her. “Just fine.”

 

After that, Derek knows that he can trust Peter. It’s not a strong trust, certainly no more than skin deep, but it’s a start.

 

\---

 

It’s the afternoon before a full moon, and Derek feels the pull of his Shift more fervently that usual. He sprints across the dense forest, trying to ease the burning under his skin with fatigue, but today the burn doesn’t subside, it just grows deeper and darker until Derek feels like he needs to do a full Shift or he’ll implode from the intensity of it all. 

 

He’s stumbled to the ground, graceless, by the time Stiles finds him. Stiles bends down immediately, dropping the water bottle he was carrying in favor of checking Derek’s pulse. “Hey, you all right?” Stiles asks warily. “You’ve been gone for like, three hours. What happened to the buddy system we instituted on Day One, Derek?”

 

“Fuck the buddy system,” Derek wheezes. “Stiles, I’ll be fine. It’s just a bad full moon.”

 

Stiles knows all about how the full moons affect him. Stiles was twelve the first time he caught Derek in the grains fields. Once and awhile he’ll join him in the fields, watching Derek dash about from place to place.  Derek used to think it was weird, but it became comforting after awhile, knowing that somebody else was there with him during the rough moments.

 

“You know, Laura accidentally Shifted in front of me once,” Stiles recalls with a hint of a grin. Derek freezes. “I was fifteen. She said she was having a bad day and that it just sort of snuck up on her.”

 

“Did she _hurt_ you?”

 

Stiles chuckles, his hand running over Derek’s pulse point. “Gave me a little scratch, but nothing too bad.” He drags his finger across his neck, to a small brown scar near his clavicle. “I like to think of it as a badge of honor. You know, going up against a werewolf and coming out alive. I’m strangely attached to it.”

 

Derek shifts on the ground. His blood pressure is spiking again, but his heart rate seems to be dropping to a healthy level. “She shouldn’t have done that. She’s usually better at controlling herself.”

 

“That’s exactly what she said. She said she normally thought of you and your father, and that kept her Shift in control. She called your her anchor.”

 

Derek’s head rolls to the side. “I didn’t know that you and Laura were that close. That she would tell you something like that.”

 

Stiles laughs. Derek feels like he’s always laughing at him. “Dude, Laura liked going to the library too. She was my literary buddy.” He brushes the hair back from Derek’s face, places a chaste kiss on his forehead. “Post-apocalyptic nerds unite, and all that.”

 

“What did she like reading?” Derek asks quietly. “I never saw her read at the house.”

 

“She liked really weird books. Science fiction and fantasy, she called them. I think she liked to pretend she knew more about them than she actually did. She never really understood the little bit of techno babble I used. She also liked romance novels, which, wow, all so poorly written.”

 

Derek chuffs out a laugh, and takes in a deep breath. He can feel his blood pressure dropping, point by point. He’s almost there, almost staving off the Shift. He might not do something he regrets tonight after all.

 

“Do me a favor, okay?”

 

Derek nods his head, weak.

 

“Don’t push me away, okay?” Stiles slides next to him, full body pressure against Derek’s back. His arms wrap around Derek’s chest, and he buries his face into Derek’s neck, breathing hotly against the hairline.  

 

Derek doesn’t let people touch him like this, not really. His father would pat him on the back from time to time, and Laura would give him fleeting hugs and kisses on the face and say “I love you, little brother”. But he never met any people in two who he liked touching or liked being touched by.

 

“Please don’t push me away,” Stiles murmurs into his hair, and Derek doesn’t.

 

\---

 

When they cross over into the Plain States territory for the evening, they meet a family with a teenaged boy who looks at Lydia like she’s some sort of red-haired angel. He babbles a little bit when she shakes his hand, and his parents welcome them for the evening into an exquisite home. They run a farm with livestock and large fields filled with crops, and they are more than willing to share with weary travelers.

 

“We’re very lucky,” the boy, Jackson, says when Lydia asks him about his family’s success in the post-Blackout world. Derek can tell that he’s used to being thought of on a high level, a certain level of arrogance permeating his tone. But Lydia’s mere presence seems to temper it, and the boy does nothing but smile and laugh over dinner.

 

Derek sees Lydia kiss Jackson, long and sweet, under the waning moonlight. He can smell her inexperience and fear and his potent desire. Back in Beacon, there weren’t real married couples, only people who occasionally shared beds and crops for the table. You could smell the desperate scent of sex and sweat on people if you were inclined toward that sort of thing, but Derek tried to block it out. He never wanted to know who was finding comfort with who.

 

“You could have stayed,” he tells Lydia in the morning, while Stiles and Scott finish packing up the dried meats and fruits the Whittemore family gave them. “You could have stayed here and tried to be happy.”

 

“No time for love in a world that’s burning,” Lydia replies with a sigh. Her red hair sprinkles over the expanse of her face, and she continues walking up the muddy path toward the main road. Stiles falls in step next to her, and hands her a full canteen of water. “Love in these times is doomed to a limited duration.”

 

“I wouldn’t say the world burning,” Stiles says quietly.  

 

“What’s it doing, then?” Allison quips from behind him. Derek notices that her hand isn’t poised over her quiver like it normally is. It’s progress.

 

Stiles shrugs, but never gives an answer.

 

\---

 

It’s almost anticlimactic. The Militia base is still there, still operating, right in the center of the Nashville city limits, but Laura and Chris Argent are long gone. The base is still being guarded by a skeleton crew of thugs with guns. From the scent in the air, they’re hoarding weapons-grade metal in the basement, and a couple thousand barrels of gun powder. They blow it up, most of it anyway, when Peter sees a window of opportunity to gain access to the back door when some thugs walk off for a smoke.

 

Lydia is a revelation with a bow and arrow, and Allison proves as deadly as ever. Some of the Militia men are clearly surprised when she turns her weapons on them, her clever knives and swords finding their targets with a practiced hand. Even Scott performs brilliantly with the sword Peter found for him in San Antonio. Their performance is something that Derek is proud of, even though he knows he had no part in it.

 

Stiles…Stiles is not brilliant. He never did get around to the training with any sort of weapon, and a couple uniformed Militia members come after him with their own quivers of silver-tipped arrows. Stiles isn’t fast and he isn’t strong, and they catch him in a corner, his back up against the wall.

 

“It’s not like we could have saved her anyway,” he hears Stiles shout from across the room, before spitting in the guy’s face. The Militia member slugs him across the mouth, and Stiles coughs up blood a moment later.

 

“Like I said,” Stiles breathes.  He hits the floor with a dull thud.

 

\---

 

They make it out. It isn’t pretty.

 

Derek has Stiles’ arm draped across his shoulder. Peter holds him up on the other side, rolling his eyes when Stiles groans without abandon as they move toward the woods outside the compound.

 

“What happened to being the watch?” Derek doesn’t mean for it to come out like an accusation, but they all know that it is. He sees Scott and Lydia flinch out of the corner of his eye, and even Allison looks away.

 

"You can't just walk into the front of a major Militia warehouse and expect the people there to embrace you with open arms and free muffins.” Stiles winces when he tried to put weight on his right leg. The wounds aren’t deep, but they cover every part of his body. “It doesn’t work like that. You need backup more than you need a freaking watch, Derek.”

 

“Did you believe it? What you said?”

 

“Dude, I said a lot of things.” Stiles is pale, more pale than Derek’s probably ever seen him.

 

“About Laura.”

 

“Oh.” He pauses, looking unsure. “Honestly.” His voice s ragged, and it's no surprise when Derek feels Stiles' entire body twist against his chest. "Yes, I believe it. We probably can't, Derek. Fuck. Not yet. We’re not ready. We need more people. We’ll need an army. We’ll need a fucking miracle to get her home."

 

"Why would you come if you didn't think we could get her back?"

 

"The world's drowning in darkness," Stiles says quietly. The wracks of his body are lessening, so he and Peter lay him on the damp grass. Peter nods, and walks over to the other three, gathering wood to start a fire. "You have to take the chances while you have them to take. And I wanted to take one for you. For her. But for you mostly."

 

“You shouldn’t have. You’re just a…”

 

"Stupid kid with a stupid crush," Stiles barks out. "I know, Derek, I know. I'm not saying that it makes sense, but it was my reason. And I don't regret it."

 

Stiles is just a kid, that’s true, and Derek is half lost without his sister by his side. She was always the strong one, and he was the soft one. He only became this callused shell of a human being after Laura was taken from him. Before, it was an act. Now, now, it’s real. But he can’t be that way, not for long, because that’s not what Laura needs him to be.

 

"You're not allowed to die," Derek pants out. He pulls a dirty cloth from the bag, grimacing when he sees the brownish dried blood stains on it. “You’re here to be pretty, remember?”

 

“Not going to die, you idiot.” Stiles coughs again. Derek is relieved to see that there’s no blood this time. “Not until we find Laura.”  

 

Stiles stares up at him, blinking rapidly. There’s a little shame there, a little needless anguish. Derek doesn’t like it. There’s some blood on his lip, and Derek tastes it carefully when he leans down. It’s not like his own blood, which is bitter and salty. There’s a sweetness to Stiles, spice and sugar and tang that he remembers from being six and drinking juice at his table.

 

“Now?” Stiles stammers. He licks his lips, spreading the remaining blood in dizzying patterns around his mouth. “Now you want to hit this? _Really_?”

 

“Now’s as good a time as any,” Derek murmurs against the skin of his neck.

 

\---

 

When the lights went out, Derek was seven. Laura was three days away from turning nine. He had gone with his mother to the department stores a week before and helped her pick out a beautiful blue dress for Laura. "We'll let her know you picked it," his mother had promised him, and even given him a crisp twenty dollar bill to hand to the cashier when it came time to pay. He and his mother were wrapping the dress in a bright red ribbon when his father came home, his glasses askew on his face.

 

"It's going to happen," he spat out, turning on the sink and plunging in the plug so that it fills with tap water. Derek could smell the sweat on him from across the room. "Tonight. It’s going to happen tonight."

 

There was a lot of rushing around after that, people tripping over things. His mother told Derek and Laura to pack a backpack with three changes of clothes, the biggest sizes they could. She told them to bring two books a piece, and a few sheets and a small pillow, if they could fit it in. And she told them to dress to go outside, in the warmest clothes they could find.

 

"What for, Mom?" Laura had asked, but their mother hadn’t answered.

 

Derek packed the clothes that were a little too big for him. His placed his two books (a leather-bound volume of _Grimm’s Fairy Tales_ and a tattered copy of _Alice in Wonderland_ that his mother brought him home from a business trip to London) in a plastic bag and shoved them to the very bottom of his backpack, underneath the sheets from his bed. Finally, Derek slipped on his best black shoes, the ones his mother bought him from the shoe store when her sister got married in Florida a few months ago. They squeaked against the tiles in the kitchen where he saw his mother shoving canned food into a muslin sack.

 

“But we just bought them!” he had protested when she pulled the back shoes off his socked feet and handed him his old sneakers, streaks of dirt prominent on the white leather. “Why do I have to wear these instead?”

 

“They’re better for walking,” she replied, and went right on packing.

 

They walked for almost fifteen hundred miles before they made it to Beacon Hills. They didn’t stop for anything, not for Laura’s wet coughs, or Derek’s twisted ankle that turned from red to black to green. By the time they made it, Laura was almost half-dead and Derek couldn’t walk more than a few steps without falling down.

 

“I hate it here,” Derek had said, three days after they settled into a little cottage near the center of town.

 

“It’s not so bad,” Laura had said from her bed. “As long as we have each other, things’ll be okay.”

 

\---

 

“We’ll get her back,” Stiles murmurs in his ear, a few weeks later. He’s on his back in the middle of a field, and Derek is wrapped around him. There’s a full moon coming up that night, and the group is laying low in outside of Tulsa for a couple days while Peter gets in touch with some of his former associates.  

 

Derek touches a slowly mending scar on Stiles’ stomach, under the fabric of his stain tee shirt. The flesh around it is still purple, but it’s healing. They’re all healing, becoming stronger than they were before.

 

“We’ll get her back,” he repeats, lower, smoother this time. “Even if we have to start a revolution ourselves.”

 

Derek listens to his heartbeat. It’s steady, exactly like the pendants he keeps tucked in the back of his jeans when he goes to sleep.

 

“Yeah,” Derek says, even if Stiles isn’t awake to hear it. 

 

If Stiles thinks they need a revolution, a revolution is what the Militia is going to get. 

**Author's Note:**

> A. I love 'Revolution'.  
> B. I love 'Teen Wolf'.  
> C. This happened.
> 
> Title shamelessly taken from the Sara Bareilles song of the same name.


End file.
